Now it was freezing outside, and below freezing indoors. A house that was cool in summer due to its thick stone walls, cold tiled floors and charmingly ill-fitting windows was, by definition, going to be arctic in winter. My breath appeared in front of me in clouds. What I could see of the garden outside through the sheets of rain was dead and grim. It had all been folly. We had bought into an escapist dream that had been cunningly sold to us by television documentaries and glossy magazine features, and cemented by the fact that this area looked pretty in sunlight. Matt had bought into it and I had failed to resist in the face of his enthusiasm. Of course that dream had been based on nothing. Nobody could really leave their home and expect to step into Utopia. Life was not like that. If it had really been possible to find an idyllic new life just a few hundred miles from Britain, everyone would have been doing it. They were not. They were just watching it on telly and getting on with their lives. Everybody else was more sensible than us. We had been ridiculous. We were stupid. I knew that Matt would agree with me and hoped that within a month or so we would be able to reverse this ludicrous move and return home to Brighton, poor but wiser.
We went upstairs carefully, one step at a time, and shone the torch around. I didn’t bother to open the shutters up there because I knew I would only have to shut them all again when it got fully dark, and I knew that the view of the dead foliage outside would not have lightened the mood. There were relatively few shutters upstairs anyway, as there were no windows at all in the back of the house. The whole of the back façade was closed but for a single door, apparently because the wind and rain came from the west, and in the days before central heating, people liked to shut it all out. I could sympathise.
Alice ran ahead of me, and I angled the torch anxiously to light her way.
‘Mummy!’ she exclaimed in amazed delight. ‘It’s raining inside the house!’
She was jumping in a puddle that covered most of the upstairs landing. I forced a laugh. This was the first time she had sounded happy since we had driven off the ferry.
‘So it is, darling,’ I said with an enthusiasm whose irony was lost on my daughter. ‘It’s raining through a hole in the roof
and
a hole in the attic floor! We’d better see if we can find some pans to collect the water.’
It had obviously been ‘raining inside the house’ all winter. The beautiful oak floorboards in the upstairs hallway were discoloured and beginning to warp. The water had passed through the attic to get there. I dreaded to think what state the attic was in, above our heads. I vowed not to go up there. Matt could check the state of it. I ran downstairs, forbidding Alice to move, and grabbed all the old pots and pans that I could locate in the cupboard. When every drip I could find was landing sonorously in metal, I searched around for something to mop up the puddles with. All I could find was a dusty pink bedspread that was under the stairs. It didn’t soak up all the water, but it was better than nothing.
I hoped that the water was not going to come through the floorboards and make the hall ceiling collapse. There wasn’t very much I could do except attempt to tone Alice’s behaviour down.
‘Alice!’ I said sharply. ‘Please stop jumping. It’s dangerous.’
Alice glared at me, but she stopped without even asking why.
‘It’s mine turn,’ she said sullenly, and she took the torch and strode ahead of me into the main bedroom.
‘Careful!’ I cautioned her.
‘Mummy?’ she called a moment later, her voice serious. ‘What’s that?’
She was pointing the torch into a corner of our future bedroom, and looking intently at something. I rushed to her side. My heart sank.
‘It’s a mouse,’ I told her. It was, to be more accurate, the rotting corpse of a former mouse. It looked as if it had been there for some time. Parts of its entrails were on the floor next to it. Its glassy eyes stared at something past our heads.
Alice was transfixed. ‘Why’s it not squeaking? Eeee, eee,’ she said, encouragingly, to the body.
‘It’s . . .’ I hesitated. As usual, I could not bring myself to say the word.
I had long dreaded the day when Alice would become aware of the concept of death. I dreaded the string of whys that would have followed any truthful explanation of the state of the mouse. I wanted to protect her from the fear, from the creeping realisation that one day I would die, that Matt would die, that even she would die. I felt vehemently about protecting her. When I was barely older than she was, death had come into my life abruptly. My daughter was never going to suffer anything remotely similar. I wanted her childhood to be different from mine. I wanted her to be protected and cosseted by two adoring parents, for ever. I wanted hers to be a world without the possibility of abandonment. I wanted to preserve her assumption of universal immortality for as long as I possibly could.
I had always looked with curiosity upon those who had it easy. There had been plenty of them at school, girls and boys who thought they were victims of cruelty because their parents would not let them go clubbing on school nights. They got ‘depressed’ about homework, were ‘traumatised’ by the break-up of silly teenage flings. Their world fell apart if they could not afford the right shoes for the party. I never considered myself depressed or traumatised, but I knew that these children were spoilt, secure, unbelievably lucky. I envied them, even without knowing exactly what was wrong with my own life. I never had a real boyfriend until I met Matt, just in case relationships really were as catastrophic and consuming as my classmates, and my sisters, made them appear. I had short-lived, half-hearted affairs instead. I never got involved.
Alice was going to be one of the lucky ones. Alice would never have to worry about anything worse than clothes. She would be ‘stressed’ over the choice between the Sorbonne and Oxford. She would go out with a spotty boy for a month and be devastated when they broke up.
She was never going to have to explain her family situation. She would never utter the wretched words ‘my dad’s girlfriend’ or ‘my mum’s new bloke’. I had always pitied the people who’d had to force their mouths round those phrases. In a way that would have been even worse than the explanation I had always had to give: ‘They’re not actually my parents, they’re my aunt and uncle. My mum died and I never had a dad.’ In the end I used to say that he was dead too. People respected me, as an orphan. It gave me cachet at school, and then, later on, it had somehow made me desirable. My father could be dead, for all I knew.
I knew that Alice would be even more secure if Matt and I were married. He had hinted that he might find himself ready to bend his principles on that point once we were settled in France. I would love it. I would be properly happy if I had a ring on my finger and the promise of security for ever. Alice would love it.
‘This mouse is ill,’ I told her firmly. ‘We have to leave it alone. When it gets better it will run away.’
In the reflected light of the torch, I could not catch the exact look my daughter gave me, but I thought it could roughly be interpreted as, ‘yeah, right’. Thankfully, she did not press the point, although I knew she would come back to the subject later. We carried on exploring, to the point where we discovered that Marie had removed the entire contents of the ensuite bathroom: everything but the bidet was gone.
When Matt returned, we were playing with Alice’s dinosaurs. The living room was as cosy as an empty room with a tiled floor and no heating could be on a February evening. I had thought about building a fire in the grate but had been unable to face going to the garden to gather up wet wood that would only have smouldered and made everything smell smoky.
Alice and I were huddled together on the lilo, wrapped in a sleeping bag, and the dinosaurs were having a party. The mummy and daddy dinosaurs were drinking from my mug of black tea, and the Alice dinosaurs (all of the smaller ones were named Alice) were sharing their namesake’s glass of water.
A gust of cold air came in with Matt. I could smell the rain. He stood on the threshold and smiled broadly.
‘Hello, girls!’ he said loudly.
I looked at him. His hair was hanging down in rat’s tails. He looked different with it plastered to the sides of his face. It was darker like that. His coat looked heavy with water. Still, he was smiling.
‘Hello!’ I replied with self-conscious jollity.
‘Daddy!’ Alice ran over to him. ‘There’s a funny mouse. There isn’t a loo.’
Matt looked amused. ‘Is that the latest bulletin? There isn’t a loo? Please tell me you’re joking.’
‘There is downstairs,’ I told him. ‘But not upstairs. It seems to have vanished somewhere in the purchase proceedings. Along with the bath and the basin.’
‘And the bidet?’
‘No, they left the bidet.’
‘So we can wash our bums. That’s a relief.’
‘Isn’t it just?’
‘Just as well, then, that I stocked up on a sizeable quantity of local wine and a bottle of brandy.’
Matt hung his coat on the door and, in the absence of a towel, rubbed his hair with his hands. He gave off a spray of water, like a dog. We sat down on the lilo. It sank down so far that I could feel the cold of the floor against my buttocks. He unpacked his plastic bags with pride.
‘Dried pasta,’ he announced. ‘A jar of pesto sauce, beloved by the ladies in my life. A bag of grated Emmental. Six yogurts. Six small cartons of apple juice, with straws. Three bottles of hearty red wine. One bottle of rosé in case the sun ever comes out. A large amount of UHT milk, sadly all that was available.
Voilà!
’
He looked inordinately pleased. As ever, I joined in with his hearty appreciation of himself.
‘Well done!’ I said and leaned over to kiss his lips.
‘Well done, Daddy,’ echoed Alice. She put her arms round his neck and pulled him away from me, towards her. I left them to their hugs, and went to the gloomy, brown-tiled kitchen to prepare the pasta. I soon discovered that the worktop was at a height that would have suited a four-foot tall person, and the wall cupboards were high enough for a seven-foot basketball player. Their doors swung open at precisely the right height for me to bang my forehead on the corners.
An hour later, we got a fire going with the magazines I had brought with me as my going-away luxury. I crumpled up yesterday’s newspaper, which I had planned to keep as a historic memento of our last day as British residents, and added it to the pathetic flames. We had found two rickety chairs in the back of the house, so we burned the chairs and sat on the floor. Suddenly the fire was roaring. It might have been the varnish, or the glossy magazines.
Matt and I sat up and stared into the leaping flames, while Alice slept, curled in her sleeping bag at the head of the lilo. Every time I took a gulp of wine, he refilled my plastic cup. I had no idea how much I was drinking. Usually I knew exactly how much I had had, because getting drunk was one of the things I did not do. Today, even with a stomach full of pasta and pesto, I felt dangerously light-headed.
The fire had finally warmed the room. I looked around, at the plaster which had fallen off the walls and was lying in heaps on the cracked tiles. At the floor tiles themselves, which were brown, cream and yellow checks. We were going to replace them with terracotta. We needed a new heating system, new electrics, new plumbing. This, I realised with a sinking heart, was an enormous project. When we had made the offer on the house, we had imagined ourselves cleaning it up, replastering some walls, and painting it all bright white. We had thought we might do it all for about ten thousand pounds. We were wrong.
I knocked back the contents of my cup, and Matt instantly leaned over with the wine bottle.
‘Are you getting me drunk?’ I asked him. We had been talking about everything except the huge truth that was staring at us. We chatted about details: about what we would do in the morning, whether Alice would get a place at the nursery class of the village school, when our furniture might arrive. We were both relentlessly and falsely optimistic; neither of us mentioned the fact that the house needed tearing down and rebuilding, nor that we had clearly made a gargantuan mistake. If I spoke about it, I felt that everything might tumble down.
‘It’s the least I can do,’ said Matt, downing his own wine. ‘You need it. We both do. Come on, drink up.’
I drunk up.
‘What’s the difference between having a drinking problem and being an alcoholic?’ I asked, for something to talk about. ‘I’ve always wondered. Is there a difference or is it a presentational thing?’
‘I think it goes like this,’ he said. ‘
I
have a drinking problem.
You
are an alcoholic.’
‘Or maybe I like a drink, you have a drinking problem, he is an alcoholic.’
Matt nodded. ‘
I
like a drink.
You
have a drinking problem.
He
is an alcoholic.
We
know how to party. You guys should give it a break.
They
are a bunch of no-hoper loser pissheads.’
I laughed. ‘That’s why English is a difficult language to learn. All those irregular conjugations.’
‘But sweetheart,’ he said, suddenly serious, ‘you don’t have a drinking problem. You are not an alcoholic. I realise I am stating the obvious. Getting a teeny bit pissed under these circumstances –’ he looked around with wide eyes – ‘is not going to make the sky come crashing down.’ We both looked anxiously at the ceiling. This seemed to be tempting fate most unwisely. I snuggled into his shoulder for protection. ‘I love you the way you are,’ he continued, once we had established that this particular disaster was not imminent, ‘but you can join me for more than two glasses of wine occasionally, specially now we’re out here. Christ, you probably wouldn’t even get drunk at your own wedding.’
I looked at him, trying not to smile. ‘What did you just say?’
He blushed slightly. ‘Nothing. Just a figure of speech.’
I let it go. His words, and the wine, had given me a warm glow. Matt and Alice were my entire world, and that was what mattered wherever we were. I decided that I could be fairly certain that Matt was coming round to the idea of marriage. He owed it to me. He owed it to Alice, who would be exquisite as a bridesmaid.